Fielding Dawson

The writer and visual artist Fielding Dawson, who has died aged 69, worked in two of the centres of the postwar American avant-garde - Black Mountain College, North Carolina, and New York - during a period of unparalleled confidence and fertility.

At the age of eight, he moved from New York to Kirkwood, near St Louis, where his father worked as a journalist. His mother bought him a typewriter at 15, remarking, "We could use a new Saroyan." After taking portraiture classes with Tanasko Milovich at the St Louis school of fine art, he enrolled at Black Mountain College in 1949, alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Kenneth Noland, to study painting under Franz Kline and writing under Charles Olson.

The college had been founded in 1933 as an experimental community of students and teachers, defying the crippling specialisation of industrial education. It blossomed with the arrival of the Bauhaus artists Josef and Anni Albers, refugees from Nazi Germany, and took an even more radical turn under Olson's rectorship in 1951.

He guided a group of poets later bracketed under the name of the school - including Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan, Joel Oppenheimer, Ed Dorn and Dawson - several of whom returned to the college's Lake Eden campus to teach, where they were joined by such seminal figures as Willem de Kooning, Stefan Wolpe, John Cage, Merce Cunningham, MC Richards, Paul Goodman and Buckminster Fuller, before financial collapse closed the college in 1956.

The Black Mountain experience shaped Dawson's future. Drafted in 1953, as a conscientious objector he served as a military hospital cook near Heidelberg, then returned to New York to immerse himself in the art scene. He became a habitué of the old Cedar bar on University Avenue and of Max's Kansas City, carousing grounds for Kline, de Kooning, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollock and the next generation of conceptual artists.

Dawson wrote about them all. Like many Black Mountain alumni - only around 20 students graduated, but that was hardly the point of studying there - he was a baseball aficionado, and pitched for Max's softball team. He was also at the heart of small press publishing, writing and drawing for such literary journals as Jargon, Sparrow, Kulchur and Caterpillar.

Wider acclaim greeted his Emotional Memoir Of Franz Kline (1967), published five years after the painter's death. Three years later, Black Sparrow Press took him on with Krazy Kat/The Unveiling And Other Stories 1951-1968. This assumed its place within a corpus of 22 books written over five decades, most of which are anthologies of shorter fiction, among poems, essays and the Penny Lane trilogy of novels. A New York Times review described Dawson's style as "loose", but this overlooked the guile and craft in his fiction, as well as an engagement with Olson's demand for projective writing, where form emerges from content alone.

Dawson's essays demonstrated a similar speeding, jump-cut vigour, born of a poet's ear and sense of measure, that, in turn, recalled the elastic phrasing of the bebopper and the heroic vitalism of the action painter, both of whom he strongly identified with. Of all the documenters of Black Mountain, he was the only one who studied there, and The Black Mountain Book (1970) came closer than any other to illuminating the poetics of a great era.

Dawson took these concerns into dangerous spaces in 1984 with his writing class for maximum-security prisoners. This revolutionised his life. It was no easy ride: raging men attended his classes, and criticism engendered threat. In recognition of his ability, Dawson was invited to chair American PEN's then flagging prison-writing committee, which he carried off with combative élan, later reading inmates' work on a weekly radio broadcast, Breaking Down The Walls. He continued to teach at prisons such as Sing-Sing and Attica, and in women's shelters, for the rest of his life, and became a passionate advocate of prison reform.

Dawson lived in the same loft in Manhattan's Union Square neighbourhood for 38 years. He continued to lecture widely, and the last of his shows, fusing word and image, was held at the Jack Tilton Gallery, New York, last autumn. Always sparky company, his optimism and generosity were unremitting, although he remained far from wealthy throughout his life. In spite of the experimental writer's lot in a time of cultural banality, he maintained a belief in the necessity of what he described as "the fresh vitality in space, in our composing atemporal images, finding a new, vivid, rewarding - great doors opened - freedom".

He is survived by his wife, Susan Maldovan.

Guy Fielding Lewis Dawson, writer, painter and teacher: born August 2 1930; died January 5 2002